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Goose Island Brewing’s Ten Hills and Bourbon County: Is There Life Under Anheuser Busch?

My genuine affection for Goose Island Brewing, Chicago’s first major brewery, goes back to 1995, when John Hall opened the spin-off brewery necessitated by the success of his original brewpub, Clybourn. Back then, it was dead-easy to keep track of all the country’s microbreweries. There were only a relative handful and I was in the beverage trade, so I got samples from GI long before they started distributing out West. I was a resident of the Chicago suburbs (Des Plaines, Park Ridge) for a short but formative time as a teenager and was fond of that amazing city – and remain a staunch Cubs fan to this day – so a brewery opening there? I networked like a Hollywood agent to get something to taste…and was very impressed.

Clybourn Pub, Chicago’s Original Brewpub

But we all grow older. I see the proof of that statement every day while shaving, and John Hall got tired of the explosive craft brewing marketplace and decided to go back to what he loved most – running Clybourn and his newer brewpub, the beloved Wrigleyville. So he sold Goose Island…and therein lies The Rub. And it is a planetary-scale Rub.

He sold it to Anheuser-Busch, or more precisely, the mega-mega-conglomerate that resulted from A-B surrendering its status as an American company and merging with InBev, a huge Belgian/Brazilian “brewing” corporation that’s almost single-handedly put the ? into “questionable”.

I almost cried. Anheuser-Busch, after all, is the same pack of bean-countin’ crap-weasels who ruined Red Hook. After partnering with A-B to get wider distribution, Red Hook and their spiritual cousins, Widmer Brothers, formed a veritable Do/Don’t of how to partner with a company which openly values dollars over quality. Red Hook listened to the A-B economics lessons and their beer went down the toilet, in qualitative terms. Today, Red Hook, while distributed everywhere and doubtless out of the financial hole they fell into post-partnering, is mentioned in exactly nobody’s list of best Northwest, let alone American, craft brewers. Widmer, on the other hand, firmly told the A-B “efficiency” folks to take a hike and continues to brew fine beers. The Widmer example proves that, at least in cases in which AB/InBev is a limited partner, brewing great beer is still possible. But would this principle apply to Goose Island, a wholly-owned property?

Goose Island Founder, John Hall

The answer? “Too soon to tell“.

Since their acquisition, a couple of things have happened. Brewmaster Greg Hall, who was arguably the soul of GI’s quirkily soulful ales, left. Craft brewing fans everywhere debated and mourned. The gnashing of teeth, which is not as common as you might think, was heard from all over the map. And the formerly uber-laid-back Goose Island, once almost embarrassed to promote themselves in ways that many other breweries would consider routine, suddenly began a campaign of self-promotion which seems almost frantic. This very dynamic explains how, out of the blue, I suddenly started receiving boxes of Goose Island products for review.

Transparency time: a PR firm, on behalf of their client AB/InBev, contacted me and sent these samples. Almost the same day, after providing my address to the contact person for shipping, she got back to me with an offer to send info on some accessory thing being peddled by her client. I took a deep breath and came clean: I’m the guy who wrote what has – to my utter dismay – one of the most widely-read blog posts ever written on the subject of beer, “Why I Don’t Drink Budweiser…And Why I’m Not Alone“. This impromptu little rant, which ran in the late summer of 2011, got literally millions of page hits. And all it was, boiled down, was me, gloating over the fact of AB’s shrinking sales figures. I got wounded emails and attempted refutations from people at A-B (this is pre-buyout) in St. Louis, and a torrent of praise, neither of which was all that deserved. But it basically trashed the quality of A-B’s crappy beer, so I quickly explained, in what I hope were at least civil terms, that I had zero interest in helping AB/InBev promote anything beyond seeing for myself what Goose Island was going to do after hopping into bed with Satan.

I’m getting GI samples. Writers all over the place are getting GI samples. There’s a new press release daily. This at least smells like one of two things: Goose Island staffers desperately trying to convince us (and themselves, probably) that they can still remain relevant after Selling Out…OR, far less attractively, yet another of AB/InBev’s lame/desperate ploys to buy the craft brewing cred which they’re not capable of earning on their own (witness the blizzard of faux-craft brands cranked out by AB, ever since the craft beer phenomenon began to gather steam, all of which save Shock Top mysteriously disappeared).

But I was curious. So here comes two bottles with…blank labels. I emailed the PR lady for info on them. She said they hadn’t even decided on a label yet. Later that same day, I found the label on GI’s website. Hmmmm…The first, Goose Island Ten Hills Pale Ale, was the two blanks. I chilled it and came back a few hours later and tried it, ready to get my smirky validation that, no, Nobody Escapes The Black Hole.

And was rather happily surprised.

I am so profoundly bored with most Pale Ales, these days, that I literally forget many two seconds after tasting them. They’ve become what Brown Ale was a few years back: an afterthought, a rote exercise in covering the stylistic spectrum. “We need a Pale Ale. Go brew one.” With about that much inspiration. If I’m going to choose to drink a Pale, it’s gonna be Georgetown Brewing’s “Manny’s”, Deschutes “Mirror Pond”, Cascade Lakes “Pine Marten”, Sierra Nevada Pale, Epic Brewing “Copper Cone”, or (when I can get it) Maine Beer Company’s classic “Mo”. Now, I have to add Goose Island “Ten Hills” to that list.

Ten Hills, much to my teeth-grinding dismay, is one of the two or three best – and certainly most distinctive – Pales I’ve tasted in a year. There is a wildly-appealing spiciness and savory character to this which lifts it well above the average run of Pales. Notes of tree fruit (apples, apricots, white peaches, pears) lurk all across the palate. Subtle, hops-derived baking spices float on a bed of light caramel, biscuits ‘n’ honey, and whole grain cereal. And the secondary hops flavors are a lovely, resiny pine/spruce that keeps the beer lively on the palate and nicely chewy in the mouth. The balance is excellent and the finish is lingering but clean. It is, in a nutshell, the kind of Pale Ale that a superior brewery like, say…Goose Island would make…Oh, wait… 93 Points

One bottle came with a label and sent me into instant swoons of delight. Goose Island’s barrel-aged series “Bourbon County”, is one of American brewing’s most sought-after and respected labels. I had my own bottle of Goose Island “Bourbon County Stout” 2013, so I threw that into this tasting and was, yet again, floored by how much concentrated, deep, solid, rib-stickin’ flavor can be crammed into one 12 oz. bottle. Anyone who reads this bloglet knows my Abyss Mania. Bourbon County is one of only three other ales that I put into that ultimate tier of American Stouts and the 2013 does NOT disappoint. In the highly-suspect event that there is a single person at AB/InBev with two working brain cells, they would be well-served not to even think of monkeying around with Bourbon County at all. Trust me, BudBrains, there is NO way that any cost-cutting, efficiency ploys are going to do anything to the near-perfection of this beer except to diminish it. Every classic flavor that geeky types like me hope for in a big American Imperial Stout is on display in this: dark-roast coffee, HUGE licorice, blackstrap molasses, bitter chocolate, fresh figs, sage, smoke, Brandied cherries, mixed nuts, and that Bourbon! Those barrels! The hallmark interplay of rich Kentucky booze and fine-grained oak…it’s about as perfect a flavor pairing as you’ll find in any form of Things You Consume. This beer has been world-class since they started brewing it and it appears, happily, that someone has – at least temporarily – managed to hold off the corporate tweakers from Messin’ with The King. 100 Points

The Stout, however, was not the swoon-inducer. That was reserved for the Goose Island Bourbon County Barleywine. I had never held a bottle of the stuff in my hand. Why? Ain’t distributed in Seattle. And this year, yet again, NADA. Zippo. No Bourbon County for us mildewed Northwesterners. And there it was, under all that bubble wrap, in my fevered hand.

It…is…Magnificent. I mean flat-out, slap yo’ pappy, fall-down GORGEOUS. At its core, it’s not built at all differently from the Stout but the Barleywine brings an aggressive booziness to the party; an intensity that’s slightly smaller than in the Stout and a tapestry of core flavors that lets the Bourbon and wood shine through even more emphatically. The Barleywine itself is a classic English-style BW, but bolstered by a more American hops profile that builds in a razor’s edge of resins and citrus underneath an avalanche of roasted nuts, fruitcake, raisins, dried fruit, horehound candy, dark caramel, waffle cone, dried figs, grilled plums, and savory herbs, all swimming in ridiculously-bold Bourbon intensity that’s graced prettily by vanilla-cream oak notes. The effect is almost symphonic. I literally had to sit motionless and think while holding the liquid in my mouth to get the full effect. Neither this nor the Stout should ever be chilled to more than about 54 degrees, or roughly what would happen if you set the room-temperature bottle in your fridge for maybe 15-20 minutes. Very cold, the flavors are somewhat muted but as the beer warms, aromas billow out of the glass and flavors soften and broaden until this amazing ale almost literally makes your little sensory pinball machine go “Tilt”. 99 Points

On the available evidence, Goose Island has shown no ill effects from the acquisition. But it’s early yet. If Ten Hills proves to be the popular and critical hit it probably will, the AB/InBev gang will point to the fact that the very distinctive hops used in it came from THEIR hops supplier, Elk Mountain Farms of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. The whole point of the buyout was to gain craft-beer cred for AB/InBev, remember, and anyone who thinks this bunch wouldn’t stoop to trying to spin a good review into acceptance of their brands in general simply hasn’t been paying attention for, say, the past 100 years.

I imagine I won’t be getting any more samples from the PR firm, after this review. And I regret that. I remain a staunch Goose Island fan until I see a good reason not to be. And there is even a legitimate argument to make for the idea that this review, despite the lavish praise, was the very definition of “ungracious”. Guilty. But then I regard the tied houses, the buyouts and closings of competing breweries, the corporate arrogance, the cynical marketing ploys, the initial foisting upon the American public of a product which even the guy who invented it referred to as “that slop”, and remarks like the one at AB’s corporate gathering, just after the Goose Island buyout, in which one executive said, “We cannot allow the paradigm to change“…as ungracious, too. No, two wrongs do not make a right. But Carlos Brito and all the execs with AB/InBev have their millions to insulate them from my uncouth observations. I have only the occasional opportunity to tell the truth…and to have a little wicked fun doing it.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.